ABSTRACT

Foregrounding queerness within peace and justice studies provides an opportunity to better understand the central role that sexuality and gender has played in structuring knowledge, politics, and activism. Ultimately, it helps teachers and students position themselves more creatively and justly in relation to the regimes of sexuality and gender that we/they inhabit. Historically, there is a tension between the historical roots of peace and justice studies and its attachment, at times, to a politics of respectability, given its roots in religious traditions and, unspoken or not, middle-class norms of reform, propriety, and the family. To wrench the frames of peace and justice studies, then, is to question and possibly trouble what teacher teaches in ways both deeply challenging and profoundly promising. A review of scholarship within peace and justice studies journals reveals some focus on LGBT and queer issues, but not a robust integration of them.